Battles over Faecal Management: Public Health, Agricultural Demand and Grassroots Governance in Yin County, China, 1946-1948

This article examines faecal management disputes in Yin County during the late 1940s. It shows how public health, at the county level in Republican China, served more as a rhetoric of legitimacy for competing interests than as effective administrative practice. Under the New County System, the Nationalist Government required county governments to lead public health initiatives, prompting Yin County to abolish the faecal contracting system and establish direct public administration. Between 1946 and 1948, resistance from former contractors and faecal workers undermined these efforts. To reconcile agricultural demand with sanitary concerns, the county government authorised farmers’ associations to manage faeces cooperatively. Yet speculation within this framework led to its collapse, forcing the government to resume public operations while maintaining limited collaboration with farmers’ associations. Such instability in faecal management reflected not only the weakness of county-level public health administration, but also the broader fragility of Nationalist rule at the grassroots.